Dave, what’s on your PowerBook? What cool apps do you have that I should know about? What Dashboard widgets? Etc. etc etc.

For the first time in a long time, I did a complete wipe of my hard disk on my 1Ghz Titanium PowerBook in preparation for installing Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, actually, so this is a great time for me to be able to answer that question.

First off, the very clean install was because I’d been experimenting with Linuxes for the PowerBook (alas, none can talk to the WiFi subsystem, which makes them HUGELY limited for my purposes) and was ready to get rid of them all and reclaim the approx 3GB of space they were taking up.

My pal Kirk McElhearn gave me the tip on how to do this too: boot off the Install DVD, then choose Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. Then just “erase” the disk and it automatically does a clean, dare I say “pristine”, install. Easily done, total elapsed time, about 45 minutes. Then I additionally installed some of the Xcode package to get more of the BSD subsystem, the gcc compiler, etc.

Then it was time to install software and utilities, and re-enter license codes to get them all happy again. Here’s what I ended up installing…